Written in the wake of successful passage of the National Origin Quota Act of 1924, this long book argues that America lost its way by accepting large numbers of unassimilable immigrants, starting with the famine Irish in the latter 1840s and continuing with the "new immigrants" of the 1880s onward. All immigration before the mid-1800s came from similar stock, Stoddard says, but in accepting “difference,” America started to go wrong. It now had a chance to right itself. Stoddard is particularly angry with American capitalism, which he argues sold its soul for cheap labor after the Civil War and has paid dearly ever since. Stoddard offers the history of Lowell, MA, as an example, where he recalls that the American mill girls worked "leisurely" thirteen-hour days! He writes well, and provides copious statistics and historical background for his argument. Like the other nativists of his day, he exaggerates America’s English roots and overstates the statis of colonial America in pushing his idea that American culture and institutions crystallized over several decades without interference from outsiders. There’s much here on “new” and “old” immigration, the purported differences between the immigrants who came from southern and eastern Europe (c. 1880-1920), and northern Europeans who came mostly in the 1700s. Stoddard, of course, traced his ancestry to the earlier wave of newcomers. He and fellow member of the Immigration Restriction League (IRL) were both Harvard men admired by Adolf Hitler.